The job title only tells you so much. An interaction designer or service designer might have spent years working across healthcare, financial services or local government before joining us. They bring skills, instincts and experience that a job title simply cannot capture.
As our design community has grown, we wanted to understand what we skills we actually have. Not through informal conversations or a rough sense of who is good at what, but properly. So we built a skills matrix.
This is the story of how we did it, and what we found.
Starting with the basics
Our lead designers began by listing every skill an interaction or service designer might have or need. That list came to around 80 distinct capabilities, which we grouped into 14 categories covering everything from core design craft to ways of working and technical understanding.
Before going any further, we opened it up. We shared the list with the wider design community on Slack and asked people to add anything we had missed. This was not just a sense check. It set the tone for what we wanted this to feel like: something we were doing together, not something being done to people.
Getting the survey right
Once we were confident the list was thorough, we built a self-assessment survey using the Government Digital and Data profession framework ratings: unfamiliar, awareness, working, practitioner and expert.
We tested it with a small group first, and their feedback shaped the final version in ways that mattered. They told us the purpose needed to be clearer upfront, because without context some designers worried it might be used to evaluate their performance. That was never the intention, and we made sure subsequent messaging said so plainly.
They also flagged that some skill categories were too broad, and that self-reporting introduces a natural bias in how people rate themselves. We cannot fully eliminate that, but being honest about it is a start.
What the data showed us
We sent the survey to all interaction and service designers across the Ministry of Justice. Completion was voluntary, and around 85 per cent of the team took part.
The volume of data that came back was significant. To make sense of it, we worked with a performance analyst who translated the raw results into an interactive Power BI dashboard. It lets us see the highest and lowest scoring skills across the team, filter by practice, individual or proficiency level, and view a radar chart showing each designer's individual skills profile.
We will shortly share personalised views with everyone who completed the survey.
Why this matters
Understanding what our designers can do means we can support them better. It means learning and development conversations can be grounded in real evidence rather than guesswork. It means when we are building product teams, we can think deliberately about the mix of skills around the table. And it means that when we talk to stakeholders about the breadth of what our design community can offer, we have something concrete to point to.
Better teams build better services. For the people using justice services, that is what this work is ultimately about.
In part two, we will share what the data actually showed us, and what we are doing with it.
seen at 15:24, 11 June in Justice Digital, Data and Science .